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Fall in Angeles
The Autumn '98 meeting of the LCSNA took place
over the weekend of November 7-8 in the Los Angeles en-
virons. On Saturday, after viewing a small exhibit with a big
title ("Snarks, Jabberwocks, Crocodiles, & Mice Tails:
Lewis Carroll, the Poet and the Parodist, Illuminated") at
the Charles Young Research Library at U.C.L.A., we mo-
seyed over to the Faculty center where we ate lunch, which
soon morphed, amid the detritus of our leftovers, into our
meeting. Dan Singer, who has been an "Imagineer" (theme
park designer) for ten years for the Disney organization,
gave the opening talk, "Disney's Alice in Theme Parks &
Beyond", which was bounteously illustrated with rarely seen
historical photographs from Disney's slide archive.
Daniel's apologia for what is perceived by purists
as "too obnoxious, too American, too un-Carrollian" is
based on Disney's being "responsible for introducing the
story to more people than any other source". His AW ride-
through attraction is visited by four million people a year,
and the video has been consis-
tently at the top of the family
programming charts for 17
years. Dan gave a history of the
film, starting in 1938 with the
story development meetings,
and taking us through its 1951
release which he called "faith-
ful to the spirit of the book" and
"a masterpiece of the
animator's art". This begat
storybooks, dolls, parade floats,
rubber-headed character cos-
tumes, and on and on.
As an Imagineer, Dan's
focus was of course on the
theme rides — from the 1955
spinning teacup ("The Mad Tea Party") through the 1958
ride-through "crude and closely tied to its carnival spook-
house roots" and its admirable upgrade in 1984 ("fully-di-
mensional props and figures, excellent art direction, and
dazzling special effects"). There are also a walk-through at-
traction in Disneyland Paris, and Tea Party rides in Florida
and Tokyo, which has an Animatronic show called The
Mickey Mouse Review, with Alice surrounded by flowers
singing "All in the Golden Afternoon".
A small detour into the merchandising was given:
after bemoaning the lack of a "Caucus Race action-figure
play set", he did recommend two recently released items
of great interest: the laserdisk with not only the restored
print of the film, but concept art, storyboards, film trailers,
television specials, and unused music and animation seg-
ments . Dan speculated on the enduring qualities of Disney 's
adaptation, and posited that they often used it "as a meta-
phor for a journey into the unknown" - e.g. when a theme-
park guest is approaching an interactive computer game for
the first time, using the brave character of little Alice helps
him or her to feel comfortable in a strange land.
He then shared with us some rarities: a 1954 Jello
commercial ("Was it the smile on my Cheshire Cat or my
Jello?"), another with an animated sequence of the Gryphon
and the Mock Turtle (which never made it into the movie),
and a psychedelic misch-masch of Disney animation
matched to the Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" slated
for a proposed channel called "DTV" - the channel never
made it. Dan's clear love of the material, extraordinary
slides, and easy wit made this a most enjoyable presenta-
tion.
Michael Dylan Walsh, an editor for IDG Books
Worldwide (publisher of the "For Dummies" titles), editor
of the poetry journal Tundra, and assistant editor of Spring,
the journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, presented "Trains
to Moscow: A Comparison of Lewis Carroll's Russian
Journal and E.E.Cummings' EimF, which compared and
contrasted the two journeys and their resultant literary out-
puts. (Eimi {eluou} is Greek for "I am".)
"In January of 1 898, one hundred years ago, a popu-
lar nonsense writer we
know as Lewis Carroll died
in Guildford, Surrey; he
was an idiosyncratic icon
of the Victorian age. Four
years earlier and a conti-
nent away, Edward Estlin
Cummings was born in
Cambridge, Massachu-
setts, spending his life
overturning and escaping
his Victorian New England
upbringing. Both men
wrote poetry. Both wrote
verse enjoyed by children.
Both delighted in visual
poetry, word play, humor,
word inventions, and individualistic rule-breaking. Both also
excelled in other arts - Carroll as one of Victorian England's
preeminent amateur photographers, Cummings as an abstract
expressionist painter... In addition to these affinities, both
men published diaries of trips to Russia...."
Dodgson's diary of his 1867 trip "is somewhat
pedestrian and noninventive, yet remains consistently read-
able and engaging"; Cummings' report of his 193 1 trip, which
is a ten-fold expansion of his original diary, is given a mythic
framework and has been called "a tough read". Cummings
believed he was visiting an underworld; Dodgson wrote a
straightforward and amusing account. Dodgson came back
educated and entertained; Cummings experienced a turning
point in the development of his art and political attitudes.
Of course, Dodgson's experience of Czarist Russian and
Cummings' of an oppressed Communist nation are not a
simple contrast; similarly their preparations (Cummings
having studied Russian), mind-sets and religious and politi-
cal feelings before they set out were quite different. And
when they returned, Dodgson felt only "relief, and had his
diary; Cummings underwent an "epiphany" and re-worked
Excuse me, may 1 see your invitation?
his material into an impenetrable morass of prose. For those
interested in further study, Michael said that an annotated
volume of Eimi is due out this year.
Next, Anashia Plackis of State University of New
York at Stony Brook, opening with a poignant reminder that
this was Dodgson's death centenary ("Aicouia tou r\ yvryn\"
- "May he always be remembered!"), provided us with an
extended gloss on his Russian Journey and its implications
for his personal theology. Opposed to the ritualism of the
Roman Catholic church, spiritual heir to the "purifications"
of the Oxford Movement , CLD was most curious about
the Eastern Orthodoxy, and so traveled throughout Europe
and Russia at the invitation of his friend Liddon.
Anashia traced the history of the Eastern branch
of the Church, from the literally "underground" heterodox-
ies (early Christians often having to meet in caves) and its
spread through Rome and Greece, Byzantium
(Constantinople) and, ultimately, Russia; always keeping a
parallel track with what was happening in the West (Luther
and Protestantism, the formation of the Anglican Church).
Her "diversions and digressions" included Milton
and his sectarian movement (the poet / author as priest);
the theme of the usurper in Sylvie and Bruno (the useless-
ness of kings); the apostolic succession by laymen (and
CLD as deacon, not priest); Tolstoy and his championing
of religions freedom; why Christ Church scholars were
"students", not "fellows"; Coleridge as the reconciler of
faith and science; Swift and his parables; and what she
termed Dodgson's apologia as embodied in this "hiero-
glyphic emblem", in which, by rejecting the outer costume,
he symbolically confessed his faith.
scribed these latter in great detail, and then focused on a
particular one, The Silver King, written in 1882 by Henry
Arthur Jones, of which Dodgson saw six performances over
eleven years.
Charlie Lovett, LCSNA President-emeritus and
author of Alice on Stage - A History of the Early Theatri-
cal Productions of AW and the article "Charles L. Dodgson
and the Theatre" , gave a most amusing talk titled "Lewis
Carroll's Favorite Play, or the Golden Don and The Silver
King - An Examination of Henry Arthur Jones'
Groundbreaking Melodrama and an Analysis of its Attrac-
tion for Charles L. Dodgson". The talk was illuminated by
many photographs of Victorian actors and actresses.
Dodgson was an ardent theater-goer, who, in 42
years, saw over 500 theatrical performances, many of which
included more than one play. It was his primary leisure ac-
tivity. His tastes ran from Shakespeare to operettas, panto-
mimes, contemporary plays, and melodramas. Charlie de-
"To the modern reader, The Silver King is high Vic-
torian melodrama, full of what we would see as unnatural
diction, improbable events, unlikely coincidences, and char-
acters who are either fully good or wholly evil. It is not
Ibsen or Shaw, and it is certainly not Mamet or Gurney. But
to the playgoers of 1 882, The Silver King represented a
departure from the norm in melodrama. True, the basic melo-
dramatic characteristics are there: a cast made up of heroes
and villains; a pathetic heroine with children who faces the
possibility of eviction by her villainous landlord; charac-
ters who soliloquize to reveal their motives; and a sensa-
tional plot. Yet The Silver King was a significant step away
from traditional melodrama and towards the realistic drama
of the late 1 9th and early 20th centuries. The dialogue is
more natural than previous pieces; sensational events such
as the train wreck take place offstage, rather than being ex-
hibited with complicated stage machinery; and the pathos
of the piece is realistically derived. As one historian wrote,
'Though the characters are the old stock types, they talk
like people.'"
Charlie's recounting of the plot and some of the
dialog which sounded stilted, contrived, and somewhat silly
to our modern ears, emphasized how Dodgson's would have
heard differently. (And among the initial London cast was
little Phoebe Carlo, who would originate the role of Alice
in Saville-Clarke's 1887 adaptation.)
Dodgson had once proposed writing a melodrama,
to be called Morning Clouds, in an 1 866 letter to Tom Tay-
lor. It's similarities to The Silver King were apparent. He
also discussed why this latter play so touched Dodgson,
which was particularly apparent in Charlie's dramatic reci-
tation of a poignant scene where little Cissy sits on the knee
of a kindly old man (who is actually her long-lost father,
unbeknownst to her), who befriends her, all the while forced
to hide the profound depth of his own feelings toward her, a
scene with which Dodgson could identify with all his heart.
We adjourned, only to reassemble that evening in
the Pasadena "digs" of Dan Singer, the outside of whose
house gave no indication of the fantastic collections of the-
atrical memorabilia and Lewis Carroll which he had on dis-
play inside. We thank Dan for his gracious hospitality and
camaraderie.
The second half of our meeting took place in the
Huntington Library in San Marino (just outside of Pasadena)
the following day. It's a spectacularly gorgeous estate, with
many fine botanical gardens and art collections (although
their major collection of books and incunabula was unfor-
tunately in storage at the time, making room for a tempo-
rary exhibition on George Washington).
After a "high tea" at their restaurant, we went to an
elegantly-appointed meeting room, where a small exhibit
of Carroll material was to be seen. In the three cases were
letters, rare editions, and so on. One of the letters was to
Gertrude Thompson, dated 27 January 1 897, and proposed
a frontispiece to a book of "Original Games and Puzzles"
which would consist of "2 trees, the interval between them
being the outline of some well-known figure from Won-
derland. I enclose a scrawl. . ." His illustration, (#HM 36008)
reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San
Marino, California, is below.
On to business: Charlie Lovett of the Publications
committee made some announcements about the pamphlet
series, the 25th anniversary booklet, CLD's uncollected
poetry, and the Warren Weaver material. Vice-President
Stephanie Stoffel announced that the Spring meeting would
be in the Baltimore / Washington area, perhaps with a theat-
rical flavor, and the Fall '99 meeting is scheduled for
Toronto, and we will be back in New York in Y2K. She also
talked about the fourth Maxine Schaefer Memorial read-
ing, which took place the day before (see "Ravings", p.6)
August Imholtz of the Election committee then
presided over our bi-annual elections. The slate he presented
was: Stephanie Stoffel, President; Mark Burstein, Vice-
President; Fran Abeles, Treasurer (continuing); Ellie
Luchinsky, Secretary (continuing), and two new Directors
were proposed: Pat Griffin and Germaine Weaver. Despite
a last-minute candidature from Jesse "The Body" Ventura,
the new officers were elected by acclamation. Stephanie
said it would be "disrespectful to make hay out of the fact
that there was a woman President" (as we had such a long
tradition of service from Maxine and Ellie, among others),
took us on a journey of what things were like a century be-
fore, and looked forward to leading us into the new millen-
nium.
The first speaker was our new V.P., who held forth
on an aspect of popular culture in his talk "Comic Sensi-
bilities: Alice in the Funny Pages". With a slide of both a
Pogo comic strip and Alice's Adventures under Ground
showing, he said:
"Behold here: a work of art, written and illustrated
by the same person, a product of acknowledged genius
aimed somewhere between the child and the child within,
an Aesopian fairy tale set in a magical realm where animals
can talk. Here the illustrations and the text are intentionally
and inextricably intertwined; simple enough for a child to
read, yet capable of great profundities and subversive para-
digms; innocent and fragile-looking, but canny, deep, and
enormously popular. Mixing images and dialog with flights
of fancy, verse, and loving commentary on the foibles of
the human condition, rejoicing in the multilayered mean-
ings of words, and delighting the eye with sumptuous illus-
trations which replace or greatly enhance the narrative and
descriptions of the text, the medium itself is often looked
down upon by the soi-disant intelligentsia, yet is guaran-
teed to outlast their effete ramblings by many millennia."
He talked about the world of the comic strip it-
self, from its ancestry in the ancient world of cave paint-
ings through scrolls and Renaissance tapestries up to 19th
century etchings, political cartoons, and picture stories in
England and Germany and through what we would consider
comic strips "proper" and their American flowering. He
dwelt on the history of newspaper strips and comic books,
to which Alice must be seen as a precursor, and then talked
of her appearances in these works, from newspaper strips
in 1938 to date, including straight adaptations of the story,
parodies, "exploitations", and the use of the characters in
other stories (such as Batman and Superman in the early
1940s, Flash and Elongated Man in the 50's and 60s), the
horror genre, erotica, and humor. The comics in question
were illustrated with slides depicting sample pages or the
cover. He digressed a bit into the most Carrollian of comic
artists, Walt Kelly (Pogo), and ended his talk "And as we sit
thinking uffishly about this wonderful, admirable, transcen-
dental, colorful, respectable, and much beloved medium,
what shall we conclude? In the words of the first strip car-
toonist, Rudolph Topffer, circa 1800, 'The picture story, to
which the criticism of art pays no attention and which rarely
worries the learned, has always exercised a great appeal.'
Or, more succinctly, 'What is the use of a book without pic-
tures or conversations?'"
We were then treated to a fine true-life detective
story by Hilda Bohem, retired Special Collections Librar-
ian of U.C.L. A. She began by narrating an amusing (perhaps
apocryphal) story from the time of the Paramount Alice -
how the director (Norman McLeod), the art director (Wil-
liam Cameron Menzies), and one of the writers (Joeseph
Mankiewicz) had to be "locked in a steel vault" here at the
Huntington because they had insisted on seeing the original
Alice in Wonderland (the Huntington had an 1 865), not re-
alizing that reproductions of it could be had for a dime.
From Paramount' s.4/j'ce storyboard
Her story began with a phone call from a book
dealer friend, who had acquired a copy of the 1933 screen-
play, or perhaps more properly, the storyboard. A thick fo-
lio volume bound in 3A green calf was produced, with the
script typed in the lower half, and a line drawing at the top
of every page. A new illustrated Alice? A great treasure in-
deed, but the question was, who was the illustrator?
Her first suspect was the aforementioned Norman
McLeod who, she discovered, in fact had been a cartoonist
(Slim Pickens) before he became a director. Case closed?
She thought so.
However, her journeys to, and friends at, the Spe-
cial Collections of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences' Library serendipitously brought fruit. In read-
ing over materials related to the production, and learning
such arcana as that Charlotte Henry was from Brooklyn, and
had gotten a terrible rash from the flamingos, they ultimately
unearthed a second copy of the screenplay, this time with
the inscription "six hundred and forty-two illustrations by . . .
William Cameron Menzies". Case, at last, closed.
Meanwhile, during the course of these lectures,
curiosity had been aroused by the enormous 6' x 4' screen,
amplifiers, musical instruments, floodlights and so on which
had been lying on the floor beside the dais. Quickly as-
sembled, they now burst into life with a Balinese shadow-
puppet theater presentation Alice in the Shadows. This was
quite in keeping with our Los Angeles setting - after all, a
case could be made that these were the first on-screen "mo-
tion pictures".
Maria Bodmann's "Bali and Beyond" is a modern
working of an ancient ritual entertainment, the Balinese
shadow-puppet play, wherein "lacy shadow images are pro-
jected on a linen screen with a natural oil lamp or electric
light." Maria was the "Dalang", who manipulated the color-
fully-appointed carved leather figures, and gave them life
through her theatrical characterizations, songs, and articu-
lations of the puppets themselves. She is a most talented
performer, and three musicians provided live accompani-
ment.
"Included in the motif is a late-sixties Woodstock
element, a ritually oriented culture in which Alice was re-
quired reading." Instead of traditional Gamelan music, we
were treated to psychedelic renditions of "I am the Wal-
rus", "Lucy in the Sky", "White Rabbit" and so on. In the
latter, she reminded us "what the Dormouse said" really was
..."treacle".
It is difficult to convey in prose the delightful magic
of that event, which seemed like a twilight journey into a
Mythic realm. Many of us were seated like "children gath-
ered 'round" on the floor, and it is part of the tradition to
wander about like restless kids — even crawling around to
peek behind the screen where the show was being performed
so we could see the puppets, scripts, props, and performers
in action.
The first figure to appear on screen was a rawhide
"boat of dreams" which led us on the episodic journey. The
colorfully painted figures, splendid vocal characterizations,
and incidental music enraptured us, with the freshness of
discovery and enchantment of children seeing "where
childhood's dreams are twined, in memory's mystic band".
But journeys, even "trips", must end; and so we,
reluctantly, departed.
1 . It is available at Disney stores, or by mail through the Whole Toon
Catalog (see "Leaves", p.9)
From Paramount'S/4//ce storyboard
2. The Oxford, or Tractarian movement, which began about 1833
and ended in 1 845 with John Henry Newman's conversion to Roman
Catholicism, was founded on the basis of antidisestablishmentarianism
(of the Anglican Church of Ireland). Their tracts argued in general
that the truth of the doctrines of the Church of England rested on the
modern church's position as the direct descendant of the church es-
tablished by the Apostles, adding a conservative option to the lively
atmosphere of Victorian religious debate. The Victorians, who ab-
horred the atheism of the Utilitarians and the agnosticism of the sci-
entists, and were put off by the enthusiasm of the Evangelicals, found
the Broad Church too latitudinarian to have any meaning left to its
doctrine and yet could not stomach going over to Rome, found these
High Church Anglicans a perfect conservative solution. The
Ecclesiological movement, which wanted more ritual and religious
decoration in churches and which closely associated with the Gothic
Revival, was a natural partner to Tractarianism for both movements
looked back to the Middle Ages as a time when the Church met the
needs of its parishioners both religiously and aesthetically. These
movements had some influence upon the Pre-Raphaelite Brother-
hood, which also looked back to Raphael and his medieval precur-
sors for their artistic inspiration. The Oxford Movement's major ad-
herents were John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Pusey.
Henry Liddon, Pusey's sympathetic nineteenth century biographer
[and Dodgson's traveling companion], argued that the Evangeli-
cal revival was a reaction against the Church's teaching of a loose
natural morality which ignored Jesus Christ, and it took form both
within and outside of the Anglican Church. Although critical of what
he considered the "one-sided" nature of the movement, Liddon treated
it almost as the salvation of Anglicanism, describing Pusey's attitude
in similar terms: "...and to the last day of his life, Pusey retained that
'love of the Evangelicals' to which he often adverted, and which was
roused by their efforts to make religion a living power in a cold and
gloomy age".
[The above footnote is based on articles by Professors Glenn
Everett and Herbert Schlossberg in the "Religion" section of the
George Landow's wonderful Victorian Web. www.stg.brown.edu/
projects/hypertext/landow/victorian/victov.html]
3. Alice on Stage can be ordered from Charlie's web page http://
members.aol.com/Charliel03/Pagel.html or 10 Stump Tree Lane,
Winston-Salem NC 27106; 1.336.724.5627; the "CLD and the The-
atre" article was printed in the Grolier Club's catalog of the recent
"C.L.Dodgson (alias 'Lewis Carroll')" show and can be ordered from
our Secretary.
Ravings from the Writing Desk
of Stephanie Stoffel
Joel Birenbaum's ravings have been so very enter-
taining and edifying that I feel quite sheepish having to re-
place them with my own lunacies. I hope it will not be held
against me by the readership of the KL that Joel declines to
be President-For-Life. I was glad, though, to recall that I
have this forum, because in describing the Los Angeles
meeting to a friend in a letter, I was wishing I could tell the
whole LCSNA about a portion of the weekend that only two
of us had experienced. Suddenly I remembered that not only
could I write a column for the KL — I, in fact, had to!
Above and opposite: bas reliefs in the Children's Court of the Los
Angeles Public Library's Central branch
For David Schaefer and me, the delightful two-day
extravaganza, which I wish all of you could have attended,
began with the fourth Maxine Schaefer Memorial Children's
Outreach Fund program at the downtown Los Angeles Pub-
lic Library on Saturday morning. Everything about that morn-
ing added tremendously to the quality of my visit to L.A.,
both as a traveler and a Carrollian. We had left Pasadena
early, anticipating being lost, stuck in traffic, or in search
of parking, but none of that happened, and so we were at the
library well before Ilene Abramson, the children's librarian
who hosted us.
This turned out to be a plus, however, for the secu-
rity guard was the first of several library employees we met
who were bursting with pride over their wonderful building.
He wound up showing us some of its features before leav-
ing us with Ms. Abramson, who later gave us a tour. It would
have made all of you proud to see how happy they were to
have us. Ms. Abramson had actually baked us cookies, which
we enjoyed while pasting our bookplates into the copies of
Alice that would be given away. I am sure I have never be-
fore been urged to eat in a library by a librarian!
The children's room is a beautiful facility that com-
bines an air of sophistication and specialness with welcom-
ing, child-sized fixtures. We visited the large main room,
and then we passed through a smaller computer room to
another larger room with a small theater at one end and easy
chairs grouped at the other. We declined the theater for the
more interactive feel of the chairs, which proved the right
choice, as we wound up with a very interactive group! Our
last Outreach program had been at the Children's Museum
of Manhattan and was really an Alice-based romp for very
small children. Here, however, we had children from pre-
school age through a fourteen-year-old girl who had recently
written a paper on Lewis Carroll, parents who wanted to
stay and participate, and a group of adult students who were
getting class credit.
We gave them a reading from Alice as promised,
but quickly moved on to the fun part — taking questions
and having a lively group discussion about Lewis Carroll
the person, the story of Alice in Wonderland, and so on.
David and I wished for reinforcements from the LCSNA as
we led a conversation that rapidly addressed many different
Carrollian topics and operated on many different levels of
knowledge and ability.
When we called a halt due
to the time and to give
books to the children who
needed to leave, we con-
tinued with small-group
and individual conversa-
tions for at least another
half-hour. I wish I could
convey to you how inter-
esting the questions and
observations were and
how the whole event
crackled with energy.
When the room
had almost emptied at
noon, Ms. Abramson of-
fered to show David and
me around the library —
the downtown LAPL is, to
say the least, we 11- worth
seeing. It had been built in
1 908, and had experienced
a devastating fire in 1986.
At that time, they added a
second building which
merged into the repaired
original building by means
of a slanting, three-story
atrium. The original building has magnificent mosaic ceil-
ings and larger-than-life Brandywine-ish murals, and the new
building offers modern facilities, including a theater where
there was a performance going on. To see a downtown li-
brary that was so beautiful and so fully in use on a Saturday
morning added even more to the excitement of our day.
As we raced off to UCLA, David and I discussed
our morning, and how the Maxine Schaefer Fund has ex-
ceeded all expectations the Board had when we set it up in
the fall of 1996. The decision to use the money that had
been contributed to the LCSNA in honor of Maxine to bring
Lewis Carroll to children and their families was an excel-
lent one. We have given away at least 250 copies of the
William Morrow/Books of Wonder edition, mainly to indi-
vidual children, but also some to hosting libraries to be cir-
culated. We have reached children and their families in New
York City, Minnesota, and Los Angeles, and promoted an
interest in who Lewis Carroll was and what his books can
mean to us, as well as entertaining and engaging children.
Not to in any way downplay the quality or worth of LCSNA
meetings, but I have to suspect that we did Lewis Carroll's
reputation and future at least as much good with our visit to
the LA. Public Library as we did later on with our speeches.
Our encounter with the lively interest that "civil-
ians" bring to a discussion about Alice and Carroll lead David
and me to lament that the LCSNA as a whole isn't more
aware of what the Maxine Schaefer Fund has been up to. Its
governing committee, which presently consists of David,
Ellie Schaefer-Salins,
Mark Burstein, and me,
urges members to come to
the readings and see whom
we are reaching and to par-
ticipate in this fulfilling
way to serve the Society's
mission to promote
awareness of Lewis
Carroll. We would also be
glad for members to con-
tinue to use the fund as a
means to memorialize or
honor people, because we
would like this to be per-
manent activity of the
LCSNA. However, even
more than your donations,
we would like you to be
there to see new faces,
young and old, get swept
away into Wonderland.
We've been there so long
we may have forgotten the
delight of falling down the
rabbit hole for the first
" time.
down
down
down
In other news, the Spring '99 meeting will be on
May 8th at the College of Preachers on the grounds of the
National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. We have a meet-
ing room that August says is "right out of Christ Church",
and we will arrange a group lunch in the refectory. Genevieve
Smith will be speaking on "Lewis Carroll and Dreams", we
will ask one of the canons to speak to us briefly, I am work-
ing things out with Robert Phillips, editor of Aspects of
Alice, and we are seeking a third speaker. We will be arrang-
ing a Maxine Schaefer Outreach event, of course.
Tbe Maxine Schaefen MemoHial
Children's Outneach Fund
o
Leaves from the Deanery Garden
I have just received my copy of the latest Knight Letter ,
and read it with the usual interest and pleasure, plus the ex-
tra one of finding my lecture at the Christ Church (Oxford)
centenary conference favourably mentioned in it, though I
should perhaps correct Cindy Watter's "Montesquieu" (the
XVIIIth century philosopher who wrote Les Lettres
Persanes) into "Montesquiou" (Robert, comte de
Montesquiou-Fezensac, 1855-1921, symbolist writer and
paragon of the French fin-de-siecle dandy).
Regarding Gary Brockman's query in the same issue n° 58,
p. 12, 1 would like to add to your very well informed answer
that before Leonard Roberts's fascinating and long waited-
for catalogue raisonne of the works of Arthur Hughes
{Arthur Hughes, his Life and Works, Antique Collectors'
Club, Woodbridge, Suffolk {UK},
1997, ISBN 1-85149-262-3, £45),
very few (if any) of us knew that
"The Lady of the Lilacs" (oil on
panel, 44.5 x 22.5 cm, 17'/2 x 9 in.,
arched top) was in fact either a re-
worked preliminary study for, or a
partial copy commissioned by C. L.
Dodgson himself from, a larger
work entitled "Silver and Gold"
(1862-4, oil on canvas, 99 x 67.5
cm, 39 x 26'/2 in., exhib. as n° 486
at the 1864 Royal Academy sum-
mer exhibition), which contrasted
the younger character (wearing a
crimson dress much more daring —
and, to my mind, ill-suited to the
girl's red hair — than the white and
emerald tints of C.L.Dodgson's
more virginal protagonist's gar-
ments) to an old lady in black. Ad-
ditional items relating that painting
to the traditional vanitas theme,
such as a peacock, the first-name
"Amy" carved into a tree-trunk behind the duenna, and scat-
tered white flowers on the ground at their feet, are of course
omitted in the much more innocent smaller version. (Cf.
colour plates 41, 42 & 43 on pp. 80-1; catalogue numbers
59, 59-1, 59-2, 59-3, 59-4 & 59-5 pp. 157-9).
Though C.L. Dodgson never commented in length on
Millais's "Autumn Leaves" and "Apple Blossoms", or
"Spring", only mentioning the former among the most beau-
tiful works he looked forward to seeing and later felt elated
at having been able to contemplate at length, at James
Leathart's home in Newcastle (diaries, Tuesday 6th Oct.
1863 & Sunday 2nd Oct. 1864) as well as at the Fine Art
Society Millais Exhibition of 1881 (diaries, Tuesday 19th
April 1881) and alluding to the latter in passing (unpublished
diaries, Monday 8th April 1 867: "I saw Mr and Mrs Millais,
his brother (Charles?) and one of her sisters {I think her
C4//Jy*v*<»
name was Louisa: she is in profile in 'Apple Blossoms'}."),
he was obviously deeply attracted to such melancholy scenes
reminding the viewer of the fleeting of time and the inevi-
tability of death, one of the major themes in his "serious"
poetry (which Dr. Selwyn Goodacre most rightly defended
and praised at Oxford this summer): one of his favourite
paintings by Arthur Hughes at the 1 865 Royal Academy was
"The Mower" (diaries, Tuesday 4th July 1865, colour plate
37 p. 78 in Leonard Roberts's book), which depicts a mower
sharpening his ominous scythe above the heads of three little
girls!
But the picture most akin to "Silver and Gold" in theme and
treatment which he singled out a quarter of a century later
was Walter Firle's "Spring and Winter", which struck him
as the loveliest picture at the 1888 French Gallery, where
he had taken Isa Bowman: it
depicted "an old woman and
a beautiful girl playing to
her on harmonium" (unpub-
lished diaries, Wednesday
29th August 1 888), and was
favourably reviewed by The
Graphic , which stated that
"the 'naive' simplicity of
the young girl playing the
piano beside a wide window
and the sympathetic interest
of the aged matron seated
beside her are admirably
expressed" (n° 956, 24th
March 1888, p.3 11) and by
The Athenaeum, which
wrote that "the chiaroscuro
and even the effect and
colour, though rather sad,
are suited to the subject and
pathetic in themselves" (n°
3152, 24th March 1888,
p. 377). Unfortunately, I
have not been able to trace any reproduction, either as a
photograph or a contemporary engraving, of that work by a
quite obscure painter of German origin.
I hope those bits of information will be of interest to the
readers of a future issue of the Knight Letter, and congratu-
late you for the high standards of that journal, and for your
very erudite answers to members' letters.
Yours very faithfully,
Hugues Lebailly
Reims, France
Hlebailly@aol.com
Thank you for your beacon of scholarly light on this topic,
so thematically important to understanding Mr. Dodgson.
Readers are also referred to a short article with a repro-
duction of the work in Knight Letter 31, Spring '89.
8
I'm staggered by the thoroughness and generosity of your
reply to my September spoutings and inquiries. Your ef-
forts in answering my every question, asked or unasked,
about "Girl with Lilacs" (for it is always an effort to find
information, however nimble and erudite one is) I take as a
great kindness. Your suggetion to visit Hughes' painting in
Toronto I shall obey, perhaps on my birthday (a date that
appears in AW, if I may boast). The articles and references
you noted I shall seek out — perhaps even looking over an
adept's shoulder at the internet sites. My deepest thanks!
Never did I imagine that you endorsed the "mad as an adder"
thesis or were wrong in reporting it. I'm sorry if I gave ei-
ther impression. And I'm sorry it wasn't self-evident that
the word-history of mad I presented was a summary of the
pertinent entry in my 1973 OED. Of course I can't know
that mad has never meant "venemous" to any speaker of
English for the past thousand years. But I can know that never
in any citation reported in the 1973 OED has it had that
meaning. To me this sufficiently falsifies the claim that
"venemous" had been the only, or even prevalent, meaning
of mad before the Mad Hatter.
I'm confident that you would have known that "mad as a hat-
ter" meant "deranged" at the time the quotations I gave were
written. Mad meaning "angry" began appearing in Ameri-
can slang late in the nineteenth century. It may be the pri-
mary meaning in the United States at the end of the twenti-
eth century, but my impression is that in England the ques-
tion "Are you mad?" still usually means "Are you crazy?"
My speculations explaining "mad as an adder" and yours
justifying mad's meaning "venemous" are but clouds pinned
to clouds until we encounter credible evidence that either
term was ever actually used. Perhaps a reader will supply a
citation and Knight Letter will make lexicographical his-
tory!
I'm afraid you have not persuaded me to furl my protest
banner in the matter of the American Heritage Dictionary
entry. The fact that Dean Liddell and Rev. Dodgson were
cordial does not justify a major reference book in identify-
ing Alice (Dodgson's real friend) as the "young daughter of
a friend". Friend connotes more to me than a pleasant co-
worker. I would prefer that Alice be called "a child friend".
If she must be identified in relation to her (unnamed) fa-
ther, I would call her the young daughter of "the dean", or of
"a colleague", or even, if need by, of "a neighbor". Onward I
march in my lonely crusade.
Thank you again for an increasingly stimulating newsletter
and for your gracious attention to my particular concerns.
Gary Brockman
Madison, CT
You are most welcome for the "Girl with Lilacs" references;
I am very glad it may inspire you to visit the work in ques-
tion, and would be delighted to hear of your reaction! In
the matter of the OED, I don't believe we're "on the same
page " to use a contemporary metaphor, which in this case
must be taken literally. My 1971 (unabridged) OED says
for mad, "5.' Beside oneself with anger; moved to un-
controllable rage; furious " with citations going back to
1300, including the Bible in 1539 ("They that are mad
vpon me, are sworne together agaynst me" Psalms 102.8).
I think we should here let the matter rest with the nota-
tion that we both believe Carroll undoubtedly meant "in-
sane". And best of luck to you in your crusade!
I have a very small correction to your mention of the Arthur
Hughes' painting "The Lady with the Lilacs". It is at the Art
Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto. The Canadian Society met
there on October 24 to view the painting and learn more
about Dodgson's and Alice's place in the Pre-Raphaelite
circle.
When I was doing the research I came across the name Eliza-
beth Turnbull in only one book and now I can't find it again.
Can you help me out with the book title?
I enjoyed the issue, as always.
Dayna McCausland
Erin, Ontario, Canada
[Re: Deborah Caputo in "Queries", KL 58, p. 17]: Mem-
bers at the meeting at St.Cloud during the October, 1997
conference [the LCSNA Fall gathering in Minnesota] who
attended the session "Versions of Alice in Early Movies"
(from the collection of David Schaefer) saw the Walt Disney
Mickey Mouse adventure Through the Mirror.
A slightly edited version of ths film is now available in the
Disney home video The Spirit of Mickey, now found at many
supermarkets (where I found it) and, I suppose, at video
stores. The whole tape runs 83 minutes, which is a lot of
Mickey Mouse to take at one viewing, but Through the
Mirror is in the first half of it, so one's endurance is not put
to the ultimate test.
Charles Stats
Oak Park, Illinois
Thank you, Charles. The tape is also available for $23
through the Whole Toon Catalog, Facets Multi-Media,
1517 W.Fullerton Ave., Chicago IL 60614; 1.800.331.
6197. The tape contains such classics as Steamboat Mickey
and The Band Concert. But by all means, ask for the cata-
log. The Bunin, Svankmajer, and other Alices are to be
found there, as well as the "Archive Edition" laserdisk of
Disney 's AW, which contains seven hours of additional
previously unreleased material.
Thought you both might be interested to learn that White
Stone: the Alice poems by Stephanie Bolster just won the
Governor General's Award for poetry (the top Canadian Lit-
erary award). It received glowing praise.
Dayna McCausland
Deservedly so. Two poems from this work have graced
our pages (KL 54, p. 5 and KL 57, p. 18 which also has
ordering information on p. 2 3).
I was listening to the radio yesterday, and briefly caught
something on the news about there only being 12 books
left of the original printing of Alice in Wonderland. Or
something to that effect... I was wondering if mine might
be worth anything? It's a medium blue book with pale green
letters. It wouldn't be for sale, it was given to me by my
father, who received it from his father. I'm not sure when
the first printing was, but my book doesn't have any dates at
all in it. It was published by Grosset and Dunlap.
Thanks,
[name withheld out of mercy]
Ah, the unbearable lightness of being....
A tidbit has fallen into my hands which is too delectable not
to send to you!
A friend is an editor at Penguin/Putnam, and knowing of my
love of all things Carroll, she sent me a copy of the attached
letter, which she came across at the office. She hastened to
assure me that this is no joke, this is an actual letter that
someone signed and mailed out.
As you will see, it's a corker. I asked my friend if I could
use the letter as long as I changed the names, etc. She said I
didn't have to alter a thing, and I could show it to whomever
I pleased. She was so appalled that this happened, I think she
feels it poetic justice if more people are party to the trav-
esty.
Hope you enjoy! And keep the KL issues coming; every one
is a winner. It's about the only publication I truly read cover-
to-cover.
Best Regards
Andrew Sellon
Brooklyn, New York
Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers
Lewis Carroll 8/20/98
Re: Alice in Wonderland Carroll/Collins
Ladybird ISBN 0721456766
Dear Lewis Carroll:
Due to a decrease in sales and lack of
demand in recent months, we find it neces-
sary to reduce and sell of [sic] our inven-
tory of your book, as provided in your
contract. These copies will be sold 9/25/
98.
However, at this time, we am making copies
available to you at a special price.
If you wish to order copies, for pricing
information contact Severia Drake, Penguin
Putnam Inc . [etc.]
Please let us know no later than 9/18/98 if
you wish to purchase copies. If we have had
no reply by that time we will assume that
you do not wish to purchace copies. This
notice applies only to the edition listed,
and may result in this edition going out of
print .
Please note that orders will not be pro-
cessed unless any outstanding balance for
books previously purchased has been paid in
full. Such payment may accompany payment
for this order, [etc.]
Thank you for your prompt attention.
Very truly yours,
Vickie Woods
Vice President and Contracts Director
Dear Vickie: please, please, pretty please may I have the
address to which this was sent? I have a few questions
for the author.
Queries
In recognition of the twenty-fifth anniversary of our Soci-
ety, August Imholtz is preparing a commemorative pamphlet,
to be presented at the November '99 gathering (a copy will
go out to all current members not in attendance). Anyone
having memorabilia (photographs, reminisences, and so on)
they would like to share should contact him at
imholtz99@atlantech.net or
August Imholtz
11935 Belts ville Drive
Beltsville MD 20705
In browsing "amazon.com", I ran across this rather louche
listing: Alice in Wonderland: A Masterpiece of Victorian
Pornography? by David Hunter, Gold Star Press, 1989;
ISBN: 0915153270. Has anyone read it?
I am also searching for a video copy (PAL or NTSC) of Den-
nis Potter's ur-Dreamchild teleplay Alice (BBC1, 1965).
~ed.
Conferences and Calls for Papers
The L.C. S.Canada is putting together a chap-book of essays.
Anyone interested in submitting an original 5-10 page pa-
per on any aspect relating to Lewis Carroll, please send an
abstract or copy of the paper by March 15, 1999 to
alphbeth@hotmail.com or Fernando J. Soto, 360 Shaw
Street, Toronto, ON Canada M6J 2X3
Rina Litvin-Biberman of Mofet College in Tel Aviv, whose
Hebrew translation of the Alice books is due this Spring, is
also organizing the first Lewis Carroll Conference to be
held in Israel June 8 - 1 Oth. Morton Cohen has been invited
to be the keynote speaker, but has not confirmed as yet.
Details will be forthcoming in future KL issues, but anyone
interested in attending or presenting should contact her at
rinabib@mofet. macam98.ac.il, or send a fax to Bet-Ariela
(the cultural department), c/o Mrs. Hava Liber, +972.3.
6919024.
10
Carrollian
Notes
Frankly Speaking
From Washington D.C.'s The Hill (9/30/98):
"Ever-intellectual Rep.Barney Frank (D-Mass.) botched a
literary reference in a press conference last week —
although none of the reporters caught it.
After a discussion of the G.O.P. plan to bring a formal im-
peachment inquiry to the House before defining an 'im-
peachable offense,' Frank said 'The Red Queen would be
proud.'
His reference was to a character from Lewis Carroll's Alice
in Wonderland, but he meant to refer to the Queen of
Hearts in Through the Looking-Glass, who declared 'sen-
tence first, verdict afterwards.'
When Frank saw that his comment drew a blank among re-
porters, he said with a smile, 'I'm sorry. I promise, no more
literary allusions.'
But when later informed of his error, Frank quipped that
the Queen of Hearts was still technically red. He added
this: 'It's very embarrassing for a gay man to get his queens
wrong.'"
It's even more embarrassing for a newspaper reporting
on this error to make exactly the same mistake, mixing
up the books in which the Queens appear!
Alice in Opera Land
Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 12/27/98
Donald Pippin's "Pocket Opera" has been a local cultural
treasure since 1968, presenting chamber versions of op-
eras known and unknown, always in English. He functions
as translator, librettist, orchestra (technically, pianist), nar-
rator, and artistic director. This production, the third an-
nual staging of a pasticcio aimed at "children of all ages"
was presented twice in Mountain View, and once here.
The conceit is that Alice wanders in to a strange land - the
world of Opera. Four singers become all the characters,
and with music "borrowed" from J. Strauss, Mozart,
Donizetti, Verdi and so on, explain the joyous wonders and
traditions of "Opera Land". Then they stage an "entire op-
era" (roughly, Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio
in fifteen minutes). Alice (Jena Hunt, aet. 8 or so) func-
tions as a "pedal point", asking the occasional question but
mostly staying out of the way until the very end, when she
regaled us with a surprisingly good aria.
Truthfully, there was very little Carroll outside of Alice's
dress and attitude. At one point she was pushed into a pool
(of tears?) by the Mad Hatter, but there was little other hint
of Carroll in the dialog. My nieces {aet. 12, 16) enjoyed
themselves.
It has come to our attention that about
42 copies of the previous Knight Let-
ter (#58) contained pages which were,
in fact, Snark-hunting maps, that is,
"perfect and absolute blanks". Before
the printer went out of business (ahem)
they were good enough to make fifty
extra copies with all pages intact. Any-
one desiring a replacement copy of
A2#58 should contact QueenBeal 2@
aol.com, or Bea Sidaway, 28675 Holly
Drive, North Olmsted OH 44070.
About this issue's cover: "ASCII" art renders pictures or
original artworks within the restrictions of characters which
exist only on a typewriter (or computer keyboard). Allen
Mullen is a master of the craft, and has created this hom-
age to Disney's Alice. See his other works at http://
users.inetw.net/~mullen/ascii.htm.
BIZARRO Piraro
(kyisc* dp kit in IVie sW of fedtf
A Ancl vjou paid HoW much tor IViis?
The Origin of the Millenium Bug
Alice had been looking over his shoulder with
some curiosity. "What a funny watch!" she
remarked. "It tells the day of the month, and
doesn't tell what o'clock it is!7'
"Why should it?" muttered the Hatter.
"Does your watch tell you what year it is?"
"Of course not," Alice replied very readily:
"but that's because it stays the same year for
such a long time together."
11
(©Jf P<®<£$£ 8c tHjPJ^
Oh, my ears and whiskers!
Antiquarian book dealer and LCSNA founding
member Justin G. Schiller, as we all have been reading, re-
cently put his personal collection of Carrolliana up for auc-
tion at Christie's (December 9th). The headlines have been
generated about Carroll's personal copy of the 1865 AW,
which realized 1.54 million dollars (discussed further, be-
low), but there were 37 other items sold as well. Some went
much higher than anticipated (e.g. items 7 and 8, below),
and some lower (the 1865 went, in fact, for $100,000 un-
der the low estimate!) LCSNA members present included
Janet Jurist and Charlie Lovett. The following abbreviated
list indicates the prices realized, with buyer's premium
added:
1. 1866 Appleton, $43,700
2. 1869 first French AW, $20,700
3. Alice Hargreaves' copy of the Nabokov translation,
$11,500
4. a first edition, first state TTLG, inscribed by
"C.L.Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll", $36,800.
5. first edition Hunting of the Snark, CLD's own copy,
subsequently inscribed to P.G.Wodehouse, $20,700.
6. A.L.S., CLD to Mrs. E.M. Ward, 1892, with original
envelope, also a copy of Allingham's The Fairies il-
lustrated by Gertrude Thomson, $4,600
7. photo of "Alice as beggar maid", $63,000
8. Wonderland Postage Stamp Case, $8,050
9. eight original photos of the Macdonald children,
$27,600
10. a roll of the charming Tony Sarg wallpaper, $253
"The" item of media interest was the record-set-
ting copy of AW. (The previous record for a 19th-century
literary work, or any children's book, was the $1.2 million
for a copy of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience,
although that may be stretching the definition of "children's
book" a bit.) This particular copy was purchased by Justin at
an auction in Paris in 1980 for an unbelievable $56,000.
The book, one of the remaining six of the suppressed edi-
tion still in private hands, was bound in red Morocco leather
in 1899, and included lavender-ink notations by Carroll and
ten pencil sketches by Tenniel.
There was a bit of a mystery in its provenance:
Schiller himself, in a 1990 monograph, wrote "Since 1928,
these markings have been misattributed as being in Lewis
Carroll's handwriting." He did not believe them to be
Carroll's, as lavender ink was not provided by Christ Church
until 1 870, and none of the corrections turned up in the
second edition.
However, just the day before the catalog went to
press, its author (and auctioneer), Francis Wahlgren, went
to the Morgan Library to check on a footnote to an 1956
article cited by Justin in the monograph. In it, he discov-
ered that the markings were, in fact, in preparation for the
Nursery Alice (1889) and not,
as Justin had thought, editing
notes for the second edition. As
the notes did correspond to the
text of the Nursery Alice, the
markings truly could be consid-
ered Carroll's.
En plena tarde dorada
Los Libros de Alicia: Aventuras de Alicia en el Pais de
las Maravillas; A Travis del Espejo y lo que Alicia
encontro alii; "La Avispa con peluca ", La Caza del Snark,
Cartas, y Fotogrqfias, translated and annotated by Eduardo
Stilman, prologue by Jorge Luis Borges, illustrated by
Tenniel, Holiday, Carroll, and Hermenegildo Sabat;
Ediciones de la Flor / Best Ediciones, Argentina 1998, 640
pp.; 950-515-169-1.
Readers of the last issues of the Knight Letter (53
- 58) have been privileged to be following the gestation of
this sumptuous and definitive volume. Eduardo Stilman, a
much-decorated Argentine writer, has revitalized his 1968
translations of the Alice books, and added new ones of the
Snark, the "Wasp in a Wig", about 200 letters, extensive
annotations, and several dozen photographs. The prologue,
by his friend Jorge Luis Borges, was translated into English
and appeared as such for the first time in these pages (KL
55). It is a most handsome volume which has garnered such
reviews as "a jeweP'and "a very imaginative and exact trans-
lation, displaying a great quantity of knowledge that is not
mere erudition" (Pagina 12), "the most beautiful and intri-
cate book of the year" (La Naciori), and great praise from
The Buenos Aires Herald, an English- language newspaper.
Congratulations to Sr. Stilman on his resounding success,
and Spanish readers for the next millenium will be enchanted
with his translations and scholasticism. Copies ($45 +$4 s/
h) can be acquired from The Bilingual Publications Co., 270
Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012; 1.212.431.3500;
-3567 fax; or lindagoodman@juno.com.
Invasion of the e-Books
The next generation of information media has ar-
rived. Advocates are calling it the greatest innovation since
moveable type; anatagonists are worried about the death of
the printed book. The truth is, no doubt, somewhere in be-
tween.
An e-book is a small device designed only to dis-
play text and images, one page at a time. The entire book is
downloaded from the World Wide Web or a phone line.
Currently, there are only two contenders; a third
("Everybook") is due to begin service this month. (The next
generation will have multiple pages, just like a book, and
the "ink" changing with the downloaded text. This is not yet
available, but has been announced.)
12
The advantages are numerous: huge amounts of text
(up to 300 books) can be stored in a device no larger than a
paperback; you can make the typeface bigger or decide on a
different font; text can be scanned for occurrences of words
and phrases, you can highlight text, "bookmark" pages, make
notes, and link information. It is handy for bedtime reading,
as well, as it has its own light source.
Of course, the sensuality, private memories, in-
scriptions and associations of owning a "real" book are lost.
What may be gained is the ease of publication - out of print
titles, new authors, student textbooks, unwieldy tomes, pri-
vate printings, and so on which are not economically
feasable may find a new life.
The two current contenders are: NuvoMedia's
Rocket eBook (5"x7"; 4,000 pages storage; requires that
you have a PC, modem, and Web access; $500), and
SoftBook (872"xll"; 100,000 pages storage; a built-in mo-
dem downloads through an ordinary phone line; $300 + $10/
month). We applaud the Rocket eBook for one fine thing: it
comes pre-loaded with three indispensible texts: a Users'
Guide, the Random House Dictionary, and Alice 's Adven-
tures in Wonderland with the Tenniel illustrations. It also
has a leather carrying case ($120) for that bibliophilic "look
and feel". RocketBook: www.levenger.com; 1.800.544.
0880; SoftBook: www.softbook.com; 1.8000.222.5861.
Crispin Critters
Cindy Watters recommends to us the works of
Edmund Crispin and his fictional detective, Oxford Profes-
sor of English Language and Literature Gervase Fen. His
books range from The Moving Toyshop (1949) to Fen
Country (1979). "You might add that the Crispin canon is
sizeable, but The Moving Toyshop is a "not to be missed"
for nonsense literature fans. Carroll was obviously a tre-
mendous influence upon the author. In Crispins 's works you
will find references to the White Rabbit, the Pig-Baby, the
Dormouse, and many more. Very, very funny, and no matter
how large your vocabulary, access to a good dictionary is
advised."
A Clairvoyant Biographer
Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background 'by Donald Tho-
mas. London: John Murray, 1996. 404pp. Index, bibliogra-
phy, notes. 0719553237
Review by Ellie Luchinsky
There are various types of biography. Like Morton
Cohen's Lewis Carroll: A Biography, Donald Thomas has
chosen to write a thematic one. Whether his is as success-
ful as Professor Cohen's is questionable.
According to the dust jacket, Donald Thomas holds
a Personal Chair at the University of Wales. He has written
a number of other books including the novel Belladonna:
A Lewis Carroll Nightmare and The Marquis de Sade. In-
deed, the Marquis de Sade gets more than a dozen refer-
ences in this biography of Charles L. Dodgson, along with
other such interesting figures as Charles Augustus Howell,
noted blackmailer. Belladonna was also published under
the title Mad Hatter Summer.
In his preface, Thomas states the theme, or assump-
tion, that ties his book together ". . .that what is forgiven ought
not necessarily... be forgotten or overlooked." With that
theme in mind, he proceeds to explore the Reverend
Dodgson's mental, spiritual, sexual, and emotional inner life
in such chapters as "Mrs. Grundy and the Baron" (Kraft-
Ebbing) and "Man About Town".
He spends much of his time comparing the inner
Dodgson and the external events of his time, such as the
late nineteenth century's developments in psychology, crime,
prostitution, and child abuse. Dodgson could hardly be un-
aware of these issues. Indeed, Thomas points out, his li-
brary shows that he was well-read in many of them. How
did he manage to maintain his strict moral outlook and his
restrained and retiring style of living?
Thomas theorizes that his morality was somewhat
relativistic. Take the instance, which Thomas discusses sev-
eral times, of Dodgson's strong objections to news articles
about child prostitution. This was not because he believed
that they were untrue or unhelpful, but because he feared
they would corrupt the morals of young gentlemen and la-
dies who might read them. At the same time that child sexual
abuse and prostitution were becoming political issues,
Dodgson saw nothing wrong in spending an afternoon with
an unclothed child-friend.
While Thomas makes several of these points well,
the redundancy of his writing lessens their impact. Also
several misreadings of the Alice texts and others jarred this
reader and lessened his credibility. For example in Sylvie
and Bruno, he treats the little poem recited by the dairy-
maid, concerning the crust thrown away, as being taken se-
riously by Carroll. Bruno's interpretation of this moralistic
ditty negates that reading. Also, he refers to the mouse's
tail as being "knotted". This was a pun, as one can see by
looking at the "Mouse's Tale", where there are no knots. He
also makes the same error as this reviewer did at the begin-
ning of her Carrollian career, that the letter register lists
98,000 items of his own out-going correspondence. Actu-
ally, the register lists all of his correspondence, received
as well as sent.
This reviewer also finds some of Thomas's read-
ings of Dodgson's thoughts a little disturbing. Some of them
amount almost to clairvoyance. In the "Mrs. Grundy and the
Baron" chapter, he writes, in reference to Dodgson's walks
in the theater district of London, "It cannot have helped
matters that one of the London prostitute's more frequent
salutations at this time was, 'Hello, Charlie!' To hear the
'Charlie' of his mother's childhood endearments tossed at
him in this manner must have been profoundly repellent."
There is no note to verify this.
Also, his references on page 296 to Dodgson as a
"jolly dog" and on page 297 as a "prig" jar the reader.
Donald Thomas has obviously done some careful
research in the writing of Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with
Background. Unfortunately, with his frequent references
to the Marquis de Sade without an obvious point, and his
sometimes convoluted language, reading the book can be a
13
3ln Jfflemoriam
Murray Ratcliffe, LCSNA member and co-founder of
the Alice in Wonderland Centre, Llandudno, North
Wales, died in April, 1998. Murray and his wife Muriel
were always delighted to receive visits from Lewis
Carroll Society members and, during the 1 1 years since
the "Rabbit Hole" was founded, have received visitors
from all over the world. From that time it has been a
tourist attraction which "Alice" aficionados have vis-
ited to enter the magical world "Down a Rabbit Hole".
Murray became a very familiar figure in the local events
of Llandudno, dressed as the Mad Hatter. Indeed Murray
and Muriel's activities in the "Wonderland" world took
them to most interesting places: one visit was to Ice-
land as ambassadors for the British Tourist Authority.
Alice Liddell spent several years of her childhood in
the family residence in Llandudno, and it is this con-
nection which the Centre celebrates. Muriel continues
to run the Alice in Wonderland Centre. It was Murray's
wish that it continue - "and so it will".
Myra Cohn Livingston, children's poet, author, and
instructor, passed away August 23rd. Hilda Bohem
writes, "Myra was a lovely person to have for a friend.
She was warm, she was generous, and she was kind. She
had wonderfully intelligent opinions, yet never hurt you
with them. The students in her creative writing classes
adored her. She not only inspired them, edited them,
and advised them, she helped them to find publishers
and she delighted in their successes. She was a marvel-
ous hostess, and whenever anyone from the children's
book world was in town, you could be almost certain
that they would be staying at Myra's and that she would
have a party for them. With all the graciousness and
charm in the world, making it look as if it were as easy
as breathing, she would put together an event, large or
small, where compatible people could meet and talk,
and where lesser lights might encounter important folk
and important folk might bask in a certain amount of
awe and adulation, all of which she considered a neces-
sary part of social civility. I was lucky enough to attend
the celebration her friends had for the publication of
her 83rd book. Myra knew when modesty would be in-
appropriate. She was radiant with pride and pleasure at
having come so far and accomplished so much, and best
of all, having gathered so many friends along the way. I
still reach for the phone to ask her a question, or just to
say hello. It's hard to believe she's gone, her presence
is still so strong."
Morton Cohen adds "She was a dear friend of mine, a
gentle, sensitive, stylish person who wrote low-key,
warm and winning poetry. She also wrote easy, unclut-
tered prose informed by a quiet wit. I was shocked by
her death, and shall continue to miss her genial
presence."
little heavy-going. There are references in it that might
puzzle the neophyte Carrollian or non-Carrollian, such as a
single, unexplained reference to marking a day with a white
stone.
As an interesting read, the book certainly succeeds.
As an addition to Carrollian, or as Thomas would have it,
Carrollingian, scholarship, it is less successful.
The First Web
"One worldwide web, spreading news, messages
and information faster and more freely than ever before.
Fortunes made in trading start-up company stocks, and lost
in the next market crash. A global community, linked by
rapidly evolving electronic wizardry managed by highly paid
electronic magicians. Incompatible systems, on-line ro-
mances, and vociferous debates about government control
and the impact of new technology." The World Wide Web?
Hardly — the advent of the telegraph in the mid-nineteenth
century did more to change society than today's incarna-
tion, argues Tom Standage in The Victorian Internet: The
Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth
Century's On-Line Pioneers (Walker, $22). 0802713424
Tenniel, Newly Imagined
Cuban-born photographer Abelardo Morell had the
brilliant inspiration of combining cut-outs of Tenniel draw-
ings inside photographs depicting the world of Wonderland,
wherein the book itself becomes a character (for instance,
the rabbit hole goes right though a dictionary). He writes,
"for me, this kept the spirit of the original visual narrative
grounded in something familiar and at the same time it al-
lowed me to invent a new landscape where the story takes
place." It's a handsomely printed edition of AW, which in-
cludes the full text, Morell's evocative imagery, and an in-
sightful essay on Dodgson, photography and illustration by
Leonard S. Marcus. Dutton Children's Books / Penguin
Putnam Books, www.penguinputnam.com/yreaders. $20.
0525460942. Original gelatin silver prints from the work
($1500 - 1800) are available from Bonn Benrubi Gallery,
52 E. 76th St., New York NY 10021; 1.212.517.3766 /
1.212.288.7815 fax.
The Rhythm of our Rowing
Meg Davis, a sweet-voiced singer and award-win-
ning composer, has digitally re-mastered and released on
CD her extraordinarily enjoyable 1987 work The Music of
Wonderland. Originally a commission from Muriel and the
late Murray Radcliffe of The Rabbit Hole in Wales, it has
up to now been very hard to find. The album consists of
original folk-like settings of texts by Carroll and her own
poems on Carroll's life and characters, from the snappy "All
my Own Invention" to the exquisitely poignant "You Will
Remember Me". I really enjoyed listening, and have and
will again, and recommend it to all Carrollians and their
children (or parents). It's that good.
Meg has recently retired from performing due to
MS, but is still writing and composing music, and is at work
on her first book.
14
You can order from her directly — autographed if
requested — at a members' price of $18.50, post-paid. Meg
Davis Productions, 1069 Newcastle Drive, Cincinnati, OH
45231. its-a-hoot@usa.net; http://members.tripod.com/
megdavis/index.html. 1.513.522.5989.
Picture Perfect
Reflections in a Looking Glass: A Centennial Celebra-
tion of Lewis Carroll, Photographer; essays and extended
captions by Morton Cohen; 914" x Hl/2", 140 photographs
and illustrations, 144 pages; Aperture, New York 1998;
Hardcover $50; 0-89381-796-1.
The spectacular exhibit from the Helmut
Gernsheim collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin (and
which will be touring to New York City {Feb. 12 - Mar.23,
1999}; Fresno, California {Sep. 13 - Nov. 28}; and Glen
Falls, New York {Jan.15-Mar.26, 2000}) has bequeathed
us a supreme treasure: an exquisitely reproduced catalog
of Dodgson's photographs, usually sepia-toned, many never
before seen, and finely illuminated by a learned essay and
notes by Morton Cohen; with afterwords by Roy Flukinger,
Curator of Photography at HRHRC disussing the art and
craft of Dodgson's work and his preservation of it in the
form of his beloved albums; and Mark Haworth-Booth, Cu-
rator of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum,
putting Dodgson's work in context of photographic art and
culture, from Victorian times to our own. The book is even
more comprehensive than the show, as it has been able to
publish many items from other collections. This is the book
to own on an important aspect of Dodgson's life, art, and
legacy. And so reasonably priced!
"Far-flung" continued from backpage
MegaShirts of the U.K. has a number of products screen-
printed with Tenniel scenes from the Alice books. Tankards
cost £10.50 each, t-shirts £7.50, sweatshirts £12.50 and
coffee mugs £3.50. http://www.megashirts. co.uk;
megashirts@stones.com; +44.494.533660.
Friends of Children and Literature (FOCAL) of the Los
Angeles Public Library are selling cards and envelopes (a
$5 donation will get you a box of ten) as part of their
fundraising efforts. The pictures are based on renderings of
bas reliefs by Lee Lawrie in the Children's Court of their
Central Branch. Two are of Alician interest. Order from
Renny Day, 15221 Via de las Olas, Pacific Palisades, CA
90272. The illustrations are seen in this issue, p.6.
For those of you who have nuts to crack, but are shy of the
$230 Steinbach is asking for theirs, four hand-painted poly
resin and hand-carved wood, fabric-accented nutcrackers of
Alice and three other characters are available from the
Lillian Vernon catalog, 1.800.285.5555 for $30 apiece.
They're quite fun.
The "Magical Worlds" stamps from the U.K. (see KL 57,
p.22) honoring TTLG, and works by Nesbit, C.S.Lewis,
Tolkien, and Mary Norton, are particularly delightful. Peter
Malone's renderings of scenes in a horizontal format for
63p stamps are exquisite. Also see "Articles", above.
The Lewis Carroll Centenary Chess Set, based on the sculp-
ture of John Somerville, $207 from the "a la carte Collec-
tions electronic store" at http://collections. stores.
yahoo.com/collections/lewcarcenche.html; similarly, a
"crushed marble combined with resin" hand-painted AW
chess set ($470) from Gift Swami. http://www.
widerview.com/mascs034.html; 1 .888. 253. 6466. Com-
poser/soprano Susan Botti's CD Listen, It's Snowing in-
cludes "Jabber-wocky". Composers Recordings, Inc., 73
Spring Street, Suite 506, New York NY 10012.
The Walrus and the Carpenter, a miniature book consist-
ing of "a 3-tiered illuminated scene reveal(ing) the Walrus
and the Carpenter seaside, commencing their Oyster feast"
designed, engineered, illustrated and handbound in brown
velvet by Maryline Poole Adams. Edition of 65. 3" x 2!/2",
12 pp. $225 from The Poole Press, 1 170 Keeler Ave., Ber-
keley CA 94708; 1.5 10.843. 0399, or 883.9257 fax.
Glass ornaments of Humpty Dumpty, the White Rabbit, and
the brothers Tweedle, around $20 apiece, from the Taron
Collection: http://www.taroncollection.com/Taron_
Collection_Glass_Ornaments.htm; 1.800.228.8615.
A special edition figurine of Alice sculpted by Brian Franks
at the invitation of Muriel Ratcliffe of The Rabbit Hole, the
Alice in Wonderland Centre in Llandudno, Wales. It is 6"
tall, cast in stone resin, and hand-painted. There will be more
in this series. Alice is on sale for $68 incl. s&h. The Rabbit
Hole, 3-4 Trinity Square, Llandudno, Conwy, N. Wales, UK.
+44.492.860082, alice@wonderland.co.uk.
15
Serendipity
I long sometimes for that early, ardent per-
ception when all narrative provided one engulfing
reality. In that Eden I saw little or no distinction be-
tween movies and stories in books. Neither was there
any essential difference of kind distinguishing
dreams from daydreams, or daydreams from con-
scious fantasies, or separating all those private nar-
ratives, from the collectively composed dramas of
kids playing Robbers or War or Cowboys: "Say, we
got our guns back, and you don't see us coming." OK.
And then say, "I see you from the roof." And so forth.
This doesn't mean that I was stupid or inno-
cent. I recognized the different levels of expertise,
vividness, plausibility among such different kinds of
made-up story. But underneath such qualities was a
single unquestionable essence: a populated, imita-
tive reality, as seamless and coherent as the world
itself. Available when the real world grew tedious or
oppressive, or merely at whim, there was a reality of
imagination. Genre and form did not come into it.
Though one collaborated in those clumsy, derivative
dramas of shootouts and pursuits, slapping a thigh
while running to simulate horseback riding, the idea
had not emerged that this was a particular kind of
making, with an essential character different from
that of Errol Flynn in "Robin Hood," which was, in
turn, different in nature from a book about Robin
Hood.
I know a woman who as a child used to be
afraid to begin a new book. In the inert little object,
in the squared-off ranks of black sentences, lay ter-
rible power she had not elected: within a few pages
she would become subject to that power. She might
start to care about the fate of a character the author
could thwart, humiliate, even kill, the character a
hostage not even to fortune but to the authorial need
to create just that caring my friend dreaded while also
craving it.
Reading at this stage is as ecstatic and
unfathomably vivid as the movie screen and as in-
ward as dreams. The film technologies of projection,
synthesized sound and so forth — if I was aware of
them at all — were theoretical, like an older boy's
explanation of special effects, the collapsible arrow
that exploded backward out of an actor's shirt simul-
taneously with a bursting sack of catsup. Despite the
explanation, I flinched at the movie. And I think I was
even more innocent, once, of the technology of nar-
rative in words. The creation of the stories I experi-
enced had a density I did not see through.
My favorite reading for many years was the
Alice books. The sentences had the same somber,
drugged conviction as Sir John TenniePs illustrations,
an inexplicable, shadowy dignity that reminded me
of the portraits and symbols engraved on paper
money. The books were not made of words and sen-
tences but of that smoky assurance, the insistent so-
lidity of folded, textured, Victorian interiors elabo-
rately barricaded against the doubt and ennui of a
dreadfully God-forsaken vision. The drama of resist-
ing some corrosive, enervating loss, some menacing
boredom, made itself clear in the matter-of-fact re-
ality of the story. Behind the drawings I felt not merely
a tissue of words and sentences but an unquestioned,
definite reality.
I read the books over and over. Inevitably, at
some point, I began trying to see how it was done, to
unravel the making — to read the words as words, to
peek behind the reality. The loss entailed by such
knowledge is immense. Is the romance of "being a
writer" — a romance perhaps even created to com-
pensate for this catastrophic loss — worth the price?
The process can be epitomized by the episode that
goes with one of my favorite illustrations. Alice has
entered a dark wood — much darker than the last
wood":
[SJhe reached the wood: it looked very cool
and shady. "Well, at any rate it's a great
comfort, "she said as she stepped under the
trees, "after being so hot, to get into the —
into the — into what?" she went on, rather
surprised at not being able to think of the
word. "I mean to get under the — under the
— under this, you know?" putting her hand
on the trunk of the tree. 'What does it call
itself, I wonder? I do believe it's got no name
— why to be sure it hasn't!"
This is the wood where things have no
names, which Alice has been warned about. As she
tries to remember her own name ("I know it begins
with L!"), a Fawn comes wandering by. In its soft,
sweet voice, the Fawn asks Alice, "What do you call
yourself?" Alice returns the question, the creature
replies, "I'll tell you, if you'll come a little further
on... I can't remember here" .
The Tenniel picture that I still find affecting
illustrates the first part of the next sentence:
16
So they walked on together through the
wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly
round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they
came out into another open field, and here
the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air,
and shook itself free from Alice's arm. "I'm
a Fawn!" it cried out in a voice of delight.
"And dear me! you're a human child!" A
sudden look of alarm came into its beauti-
ful brown eyes, and in another moment it
had darted away at full speed.
In the illustration, the little girl and the ani-
mal walk together with a slightly awkward intimacy,
Alice's right arm circled over the Fawn's neck and
back so that the fingers of her two hands meet in front
of her waist, barely close enough to mesh a little, a
space between the thumbs. They both look forward,
and the affecting clumsiness of the pose suggests that
they are tripping one another. The great-eyed Fawn's
legs are breathtakingly thin. Alice's expression is
calm, a little melancholy or spaced-out.
What an allegory of the fall into language.
To imagine a child crossing over from the jubilant,
passive experience of such a passage in its physical
reality, over into the phrase-by-phrase, conscious
analysis of how it is done — all that movement and
reversal and feeling and texture in a handful of sen-
tences is somewhat like imagining a parallel mask-
ing of life itself, as if I were to discover, on reflec-
tion, that this room where I am writing, the keyboard,
the jar of pens, the lamp, the rain outside, were all
made out of words.
That may seem an exaggeration, but Alice's
loss, which reflects the loss of that Edenic illusion,
has behind it a whole Romantic authority: the Fawn
bounding away is also Keats's nightingale, fading into
the dim forest. Artfully capitalizing every reference
to the Fawn — its name — Lewis Carroll makes it
by that much more a specific, unique reality. When it
fades far away, what is left behind is the surrogate of
language — the categories and rhetorical choices of
writing:
Alice stood looking after it, almost ready to
cry with vexation at having lost her dear
little fellow-traveler so suddenly. "However,
I know my name now" she said, "that's some
comfort. Alice — Alice — / won't forget it
again. And now, which of these finger-posts
ought I to follow, I wonder?"
The brisk cheerfulness that takes up the next
narrative move is another joke on the scenic effect of
verbal causes. The omnivorous pressure of Story moves
on.
Was there the specific moment or occasion I
imagine, unmasking the happy illusion of words as read
dramas, discovering that those panoramic densities
were a series of propositions? Possibly not. My pas-
sionate childhood escape into reading, perhaps driven
by the fearful prospect of my mother's mental illness,
may have been doomed to drive itself behind the seam-
less, frail screen of the surface and, in among the gears,
the grease, and wheezing pumps of sentence and para-
graph, the capital "F" of Fawn.
I still find the miracle of narrative prose al-
most unattainable. I marvel at the ability of even the
humblest genre writer to assert the existence of a world:
A man came into the room. I read it and I behold a man,
and a room; but if I write it, I feel a kind of embarrass-
ment, even shame: There is no man, no room, only my
own voice. In a poem, which is my own voice, relying
on the physical presence of consonants and vowels
formed by my body I feel as if I can talk about any-
thing, including anything. But fiction asserts that a world
exists. In a couple of published stories, in unpublished
strivings and hopes, I try to take up that proposition,
but unlike speech, it does not come easily to me.
My mother was a passionate escape reader;
sometimes even in the midst of her worst episodes she
would read thousands of words of science-fiction a day.
She and I traded volumes and magazines: from the
boxfuls she traded with another devotee she found
somehow, a soldier at Ft. Monmouth. Even at her worst,
even when I was in deepest retreat, we maintained a
decorum of taking turns with a vol-ume, a tacit cour-
tesy maybe resembling that of drug addicts.
She had a withering doubt of the actual world,
and I suppose that magazines like If and Galaxy were
her Lewis Carroll - and mine, too, and I would say my
successor to Carroll, except that I have never abandoned
him. In the grave, formal strangeness and practicality
of his books, in his actual poems and in his ability to
suggest always an ineluctable meaning in words that is
behind or under them, he conducted me toward poetry.
Poetry for me is possibly a route to the real world, a
way of respecting the actual - and all the more vital a
route for twists, obliquities, compressions and shad-
owy implications. Possibly, it is after all the form that
brings me closest to that old, blessed belief in Cre-
ation.
~ Robert Pinsky
Poet Laureate of the United States
Some Notes on Reading
17
From Our Far-fthnQ'
Books " "
In one of Anne Fadiman's columns for
Civilization magazine, now collected
into book form as Ex Libris: Confes-
sions of a Common Reader (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux) she theorized that
"the scarcity of first editions of AW cm
be accounted for by the fact that so
many of them were eaten by children."
A Child's Machiavelli, Fifty Ways to
Rule Your City, or, A Primer on Power
by Claudia Hart, Viking Penguin,
0670880213, $15, is "a darkly comic
and enticingly designed primer for sur-
vival, distilled from the sixteenth-cen-
tury Italian political philosopher's no-
torious treatise, which spells out intri-
cacies of manipulation and domination
in simple, straightforward language
juxtaposed with sweetly pastel images
appropriated from children's classics"
including A W, of course.
Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: The Sub-
versive Power of Children 's Litera-
ture by Alison Lurie, Little Brown &
Co.; 0316246255, is a revision of the
1990 work, now out in paperback,
which has a chapter devoted to the Alice
books. Ms. Lurie won the Pulitzer Prize
for fiction in 1985 for Foreign Affairs.
Ventures into Childland: Victorians,
Fairy Tales, and Femininity by
U.C.Knoepflmacher, University of
Chicago Press, $35, argues that the
male authors in his survey display "a
regressive hostility to growth" and ex-
press "intense desire for an evanescent
female self. Some of his arguments
are demonstrably false, the rest merely
absurd. He sees in our heroine every-
thing from a phallus to the Christ.
The Art ofZelda Fitzgerald, a catalog
of the exhibition of her works, includ-
ing a half-dozen Alice illustrations,
from the Maier Museum of Art,
Randolph-Macon Woman's College,
One Quinlan Street, Lynchburg VA
24503; 1.804.947.8136. (cf article in
KL 55, p.13.)
George Walker's Cheshire Cat Press
(KL 55, pp. 6-7) has come out with a
Cop'ic6SbOK((e>nts
nice
lovely edition of an essay by the late
Joe Brabant, Some Observations on
Jabberwocky, with a frontispiece and
a tribute to Joe by Andy Malcolm.
Hand-set type in boards, $40 U.S. 73
Berkshire Ave., Toronto, Ontario,
Canada M4M 2Z6. 1.416.469.3711.
A less expensive reprint of Martin
Gardner's classic Annotated Alice has
been published by the Wings Books
imprint of Random House.
0517189208.
Pleasures Taken: Performances of
Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Pho-
tographs, by Carol Mavor (U.N.C,
Chapel Hill). Duke University Press,
1995, 208 pp., 49 photographs, ISBN
(cloth) 0-8223-1603-X, $48, ISBN
(paper) 0-8223-1619-6, $18 Consid-
ers questions of loss and sexuality in
photographs by Dodgson, Cameron,
and Hannah Cullwick.
Noted in the Lewis Carroll Review of
the Lewis Carroll Society (U.K.)
Lewis Carroll, introduction de Colin
Ford, Collection Photo Poche, Paris,
1998, 2097541232 reprints photo-
graphs, many never befor seen, of the
"Carroll Through the Viewfinder"
exhibition at the National Gallery of
Wales last year. An English language
edition will be forthcoming.
Pictures of Innocence: the History
and Crisis of Ideal Childhood, Anne
Higonnet, Thames & Hudson, 1998,
0500280487 examines popular
culture's concept of childhood via
visual images, including CLD's pho-
tography.
Alice and Dinah: New Tales from
Wonderland, Michele Brown, ill.
Paula Martyr, Madcap (Andre
Deutsch), 1998. Humpty Dumpty's
Magic Garden, The White Rabbit's
Red Nose, etc. A series of 24 page
children's books .
New publications from the Lewis
Carroll Society (U.K.)
For prices and ordering information,
write to Mitchell Templeton, 84
Spottiswoode Street, Edinburgh, EH9
1 DJ, U.K.
Lewis Carroll - Bibliophile by Jef-
frey Stern. This is an updated version
of Lew is Carroll's Library with a
much needed index
Lewis Carroll, Child of the North,
by Anne Clark Amor. This book looks
at Carroll's early life, illustrated with
photographs and drawings
Mr. Dodgson: Nine Lewis Carroll
Studies. Papers by Philip Dodgson
Jacques, Anne Clark, Selwyn
Goodacre, Ivor Davies, Tony Beale,
Denis Crutch, Graham Ovendon,
Mary Crutch and John Davis
Lewis Carroll & Hatfield House
contains an essay by John Davis on
"Lewis Carroll and the Cecils" and a
letter and drawings by Carroll
Letters to Skeffington Dodgson
from his Father with an introduction
and notes by Anne Clark Amor
Presentation Copies of AW, com-
piled by Edward Wakeling
Articles
"One for the Pages" in The Washing-
ton Post 12/9/98 discusses Phila-
delphia's Rosenbach Museum and Li-
brary and its Carroll holdings.
'"Alice in Wonderland' Syndrome and
Varicella" (letter) in The Pediatric In-
fectious Disease Journal, Vol. 17, No.
10, Oct. '98; "Somesthetic aura: the
experience of AW (letter) in The Lan-
cet, Vol. 352, 8/15/98; "Cerebral Per-
fusion in Children with AW Syndrome"
in Pediatric Neurology, Vol.19 #2,
Aug. '98.
"Lewis, Carroll, and Seeing Through
the Looking Glass" in the Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 76 #3,
Sep. '98 discourses on Humean
supervenience as discussed by (David)
18
Lewis and (John) Carroll, [definitely
a "McGuffin"]
In the January '99 issue of Cricket, a
children's magazine, there is a 6-page
article titled "The Man Who Wrote in
Purple Ink" by Emily Rhoads Johnson,
focusing on Carroll's letter-writing
habits, and including some photos,
puzzles and games.
Communication Arts, Jan/Feb '99, has
an article on illustrator Natalie
Ascencios, whose A W painting can also
be seen at http://www.theispot.com/
portfolio/portfo.htm?client= 1 8 1
The December issue of Attache, US
Airways inflight magazine, has for its
cover story "Collectors Take Flight
with the Art of Childhood", on
children's illustrated literature, and fea-
tures prominently LCSNA member and
children's rare book dealer JoAnn
Reisler.
A wonderfully full, definitive and de-
tailed history of the stamps issued over
the years by various countries to honor
CLD, his characters, and even his
brother, the Rev. Edwin (resident mis-
sionary in Tristan da Cunha), was in the
November '98 issue of Scott Stamp
Monthly, [and who said philately will
get you nowhere?]
Lectures, Events and Exhibitions
Dr. Sandor Burstein was a Distin-
guished Lecturer at the Napa City-
County Library Foundation on Novem-
ber 15th, discussing Lewis Carroll.
Morton Cohen will lecture on "The
Paradoxical Lewis Carroll" March
31st at Waterloo University (Ontario),
followed the next day with a seminar
for students.
"The Advent of Alice: A Celebration of
the Carroll Centenary" will be on view
at the Rosenbach Museum and Library
in Philadelphia from November 24th
through March 14, 1999. Dr. A.S.W
Rosenbach had very close association
with Carroll material: he twice owned
the original manuscript, and presented
it to the British Museum. Unusual
items on display include Dodgson's
passport and pocket watch, and several
original Tenniel drawings. A 48-page
illustrated catalog with an essay by our
Donald Rackin will be published, and
he will be giving a four-part lecture
series on Thursday evenings, January
2 1 st - February 1 1 th. Other lectures are
also being scheduled on February 10th
(Greer Allen on the Snark) and March
10th (by visiting curator Diane
Waggoner). The Rosenbach is located
at 2010 DeLancey Place, Philadelphia
PA 19103.
The U.C.L.A. Library Department of
Special Collections presented "Pic-
tures Worth a Thousand Words: AW Il-
lustrated" by Scripps College Profes-
sor Dr. Eric Haskell on 6 December,
followed by a tea party and a viewing
of the exhibition.
The Modern Language Association an-
nual convention in San Francisco had a
panel "After Alice: Lewis Carroll and
Children's Literature" on December
27th.
Professor Robin Wilson of the Open
University (U.K.) delivered a talk on
"The Mathematics of Lewis Carroll" at
the annual joint meeting of the Ameri-
can Mathematical Society / Mathemati-
cal Association of America in San An-
tonio, TX, 13 January 1999.
Artist Guy Jacqmin invited 26 other
artists to create works on Alician
themes which were exhibited at several
galleries in and around Paris, and ac-
companied by many parties and recep-
tions in December.
The Vermont Center for the Book's
conference in Fairlee on November
2nd presented workshops in AW and
"paradigm shifts, reality, and transfor-
mations".
Alice Under Water, written and di-
rected by Kish Song Bear, Exit Stage
Left, San Francisco, November 17-21
is an amalgam of AW With. Dario Fo's
Alice in Wonderless Land. Alice sinks
to the bottom of the Pool of Tears,
meets her Author, and ends up going
through some "abjectly sexual epi-
sodes".
Alice's Adventures Underground by
Anne Bogart, at the Saratoga Interna-
tional Theater Institute in Columbus,
Ohio, November 5-8 "takes off from
Lewis Carroll's original text [and]... is
also informed by the darker realities
of [his] life and ways." Presented at the
Wexner Center with the support of the
National Endowment for the Arts.
The Dallas Theater Center is currently
preparing the world premiere produc-
tion of Alice: Tales of a Curious Girl,
a play by Karen Hartman in March '99.
There will also be a lecture on March
7th.
Liber et Imago, a cultural center in
Turin, Italy, dealing with historical stud-
ies on children's books, organized a
small exhibition of Alice books in the
Italian language from 1872 to 1960, at
the Fogola Galleria Dantesca in Turin
(16-30 December, 1998). They also
presented the book Quando Alice
incontrd Pinocchio (ed. Pompeo
Vagliani), an analysis on the presence
and influence of English authors and
illustrators on Italian children's books
from 1870 to 1950 and a survey of Ital-
ian translations of Alice books from
1872 to 1960, published by Trauben
Editore Torino, http://www.arpnet.it/
liber/; ber@arpnet.it
The Children's Museum of Eastern
Oregon in Pendleton opened August 1 .
One of its important exhibits is "Lit-
erature: Alice in Wonderland". (After
a few years, other classic books will
be featured). It is a "hands-on, interac-
tive" experience, with a history of the
books, biographies, poetry, puzzles,
paintings, statues, an Ames Distorted
Room, where "you can appear to grow
and shrink like Alice, when viewed
through the oversized keyhole", a com-
puterized chess set with an assortment
of chess puzzles (Martin Gardner was
a consultant), and so on. 400 S.Main
Street or contact P.O.Box 1723, Pen-
dleton, OR 97801; 1.541.276. 1066,
erickson@ucinet.com.
A "Media Dome" was recently erected
in Kitakyushu, Japan. Its main business
is bicycle-racing and its attendant bet-
ting, but to make it a more family-ori-
ented place, they installed a multime-
dia "Alice Lab" and Carroll museum
with the help of the LCSJ. There's a
"Humpty Dumpty Theater" and a
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KNIGHT LETTER, THE JOURNAL OF THE LEWIS CARROLL SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA, NUMBER 59, WINTER 1 999
"Cheshire Cat Virtual Town" as well.
www.mediadome.co.jp.
TV
NBC television has the following an-
nouncement on its "Upcoming
Projects" section of its website (http:/
/www. nbc.com/tvcentral/mms/
fr_index.html): "The NBC motion pic-
ture event 'Alice in Wonderland', star-
ring Tina Majorino and an international
cast including Whoopi Goldberg, Ben
Kingsley, Sir Peter Ustinov, Miranda
Richardson, Gene Wilder, Christopher
Lloyd, George Wendt, and Martin Short
will leave viewers 'curiouser and
curiouser' as young Alice (Majorino)
goes through the looking glass to a land
where forward is backward, up is down
and anything imaginable is possible.
This spellbinding literary fantasy
comes alive with brilliant effects from
London's FrameStore ('Merlin'), and
colorful landscapes, incredible adven-
tures and unforgettable characters from
The Jim Henson Creature Shop. Rob-
ert Halmi Sr. is executive producer, and
special effects wizard Nick Willing
('Photographing Fairies') directs from
a teleplay by Peter Barnes." Plays Sun-
day, Feb. 28, 8-11 p.m in the U.S. and
Sunday, May 23 in the U.K.
Cyberspace
An interactive version of Lewis
Carroll's "Logic Game" at http://
www.cut-the-knot.com/LewisCarroll/
The Jabberwock, a B&B in Monterey
CA, now has a website: www.jaber
wockinn.com. Or 1.888.428.7253.
A sumptuously illustrated edition for
"bedside reading" is on the web at http:/
/the-office. com/bedtime-story /clas-
sics-aliceinwonderland.htm. Combin-
ing the work of nine historic artists
(Maria Kirk, Arthur Rackham, Bessie
Pease Gutmann, Mabel Attwell,
A.E.Jackson, Gwynedd Hudson, Jessie
Willcox Smith, and Carroll and Tenniel
of course), and two contemporary
(Disney and Marshall Vandruff), "Bed-
time Stories" has constructed a jewel
of an edition. Their "Background" is
superb, and this site is highly recom-
mended. Of course, for such a heavily
pictorial URL, the download time
could be considerable.
Wholepop Magazine Online has cre-
ated an animated Screensaver, based on
the Tenniel drawing, called "Who Stole
the Pop-Tarts". http://www. wholepop.
com/features/toasters/whostole_
poptarts.html
Michael King, author of Lorien Lost
(see "Leaves" in KL 54) had an on-line
contest for new versions of
"Jabberwocky" co-sponsored by The
Page One Online Literary Newsletter
(http://members.aol.com/FICTWRI/
pagel.html). It was won by Peter
Wesley-Smith's , "Jubjubby", which was
written for his 1986 musical "Boo-
jum!".
Alice "morphs" into various zoologi-
cal forms in a page honoring Dodgson's
photography: http://www.lunatus.com/
alice.html.
The "dynamic text" version (an online
teaching aid, with animations & music)
is free from Sundance Software at
http://www.megabrands.com/alice.
There's also a chat room and a pointer
to the same version in Italian. A full
download is also available for $15.
A stunning portfolio of Dodgson's pho-
tographs from the Princeton collection
can be seen at http://libserv3.
Princeton.EDU/rbsc2/portfolio/port-
folio. html.
No seeker of rare books should ever
be without a bookmark to www.
bibliocity.com, www.bibliofind.com,
and the Advanced Book Exchange
(www.abebooks.com). They are fantas-
tically efficient resources.
Artifacts
The lovely Audrey Buckner silk ties
with colored renditions of the Tenniel
characters are now being sold in the
J.Peterman "Gift Book #3" catalog.
Black or Red, $98. For some reason
the copy reads "Slip some dark, dark
chocolate into your pocket when wear-
ing this tie." Yuch. 1.800.231. 7341;
www.jpeterman.com; 1318 Russell
Cave Road, Lexington KY 40505.
A roller-printed cotton chintz necktie
of a 1920 CFA Voysey design in the
prints and drawings collection of the
Victoria and Albert Museum, a com-
panion to the silk scarf in the same de-
sign, is now available, www.vam.ac.uk;
+44.171.938.8438.
A photo album/scrapbook, complete
with black mounting corners, and '"It's
a poor sort of memory that only works
backwards,' the Red Queen remarked
— Lewis Carroll" on the front, from
Chronicle Books for $30. 85 Second
St., San Francisco CA 94105;
www.chronbooks.com; 1.800. 722.
6657.
"Far-flung" continues on p. 15
For help in preparing this issue thanks are due to: Fran Abeles, Sandor Burstein, Llisa Demetrios, Lester Dickey,
Jonathan Handel, August Imholtz, Janet Jurist, Katsuko Kasai, Lucille Posner, Muriel Ratcliffe, Bea Sidaway, Genevieve
Brunet Smith, Alan Tannenbaum, and Cindy Watter.
Knight Letter is the official newsletter of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. It is published several times
a year and is distributed free to all members. Subscriptions, business correspondence, and inquiries should be ad-
dressed to the Secretary, 18 Fitzharding Place, Owing Mills MD 21117. Annual membership dues are U.S. $20
(regular) and $50 (sustaining). Submissions and editorial correspondence should be sent to the Editor, Box 2006,
Mill Valley CA 94942.
President: Stephanie Stoffel, StephStoff@aol.com Secretary: Ellie Luchinsky, eluchin@erols.com
Editor: Mark Burstein, wrabbit@worldpassage.net
Lewis Carroll Society of North America Home Page: http://www.lewiscarroll.org/
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